For a few moments she was petrified with astonishment. “Surely, gentlemen, you do not intend to play cards there?”
“Shet your gabblement.”
“You bet we does.”
“Shuffle, Joe.”
“But this is a post-office, and the public must come here.” All four mouths opened and poured out upon Mrs. Huntley a flood of nastiness.
[325]
The crowd in the door laughed and shouted.
Kate was disgusted and shocked. Then she added :
“This office belongs to the government.”
“Dawg awn your government.”
“Hurrah fer Jeff Davis !”
“Drat niggah government !”
“Clubs are trumps.”
“Play !”
Kate walked quickly round from behind the delivery window.
She stood close beside the sitting bullies on the floor. She stood facing the gaping, grinning, shouting bullies in the door.
“You must go out of here.” Her voice was fine and clear. It rang out over the heads of the crowd.”
“Go to ——, you — — Yankee ——.”
It was a puttering of foulness.
It was horrible.
ex O. T. Beard, Chapter 32, “Untamed Tigers,” in Bristling with Thorns (“A Story of War and Reconstruction”); (New York, 1887) : 325
Princeton copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
same (via google books) : link
1884 edition (same plates), NYPL copy (one of three scans via hathitrust) : link
Oliver Thomas Beard (1832-1898)
- profiled in Henry Hall, ed., America’s Successful Men of Affairs; An Encylopedia of Contemporaneous Biography. Vol I, Greater New York (The New York Tribune, 1895) : 67-68 : link
OLIVER THOMAS BEARD, lawyer, born in New York city, Nov. 13, 1832, is one of three notable brothers. His father, the late William Beard, a native of Ireland, came to America in 1825, and through tireless energy and unusual foresight rose to prominence as a railroad builder and contractor, dying in Brooklyn, Jan. 7, 1886, at the age of eighty-two. A portion of his property in Brooklyn consisted of wharves and stores, now extremely valuable. Oliver studied during boyhood in the local schools and at Nazareth, Pa. Inheriting his father’s enterprise, he crossed the plains at the age of sixteen and engaged in gold mining, the construction of wharves and similar enterprises, and in 1852 in railroad building in South America. Returning to his native land, he enlisted in April, 1861, as a private in the 71st N.Y. Vol’s, and rose to be Lieutenant Colonel of the 48th N.Y. Moore’s Rebellion Records give him credit for commanding the first body of colored troops actually engaged in battle. During the draft riots of 1863 in New York city, he aided in placing the office of THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE in a state of defense with barricades of bales of paper, etc. After the war Mr. Beard practiced law in Ohio and Michigan with some success, later edited The Post and Tribune, of Detroit, and, being an ardent Republican, took an active part in political affairs. For more than twenty years he served his party in various parts of the Union as a campaign orator, and was chairman of the committee of the Union League of America, which notified Mr. Lincoln of his re-nomination in 1864. He has written much for publication, including novels and short stories, principally of a political nature, his “Bristling With Thorns” being a study of Southern character. Mr. Beard inherited a large property, which now occupies his time, consisting mainly of the Erie Basin, Columbia Basin, and Amity and Congress streets warehouses in Brooklyn. He married Elizabeth Mossgrove in Steubenville, O., and has five children, Ida M. Welton, Ula Lanphere, Mary D. Perkins, Anson McCook Beard, and William Mossgrove Beard.
- this, from a list of “New American Books and Recent Importations,” in Trubner’s American and Oriental Literary Record (1884) : 62 : link —
A sensationally written story. The horrors of Andersonville and the Ku Klux outrages are described in painfully plain language. The “poor white trash” or Southern “crackers” are pictured in all their ignorance and degradation, and they are shown as the result, in part, of the old slavery system. - various mentions (letters to the editor, political speeches and activity, announcements of his talks, etc., all in the 1880s) are found via a search for “O T Beard” in Digital Michigan Newspapers : link
- Beard is mentioned as author of a novel (in newspapers only?) entitled Trade and Trouble
in Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan ; A Chronological Cyclopedia of the City of Detroit, Michigan, Past and Present (Third edition, revised and enlarged, 1890) : (link)
2 November 2025